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The Fried Critic

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This week, Elias, Preston and Russell tackle the Death Note movie and chat a bit about the 2010 surrealist comedy anime, And Yet The Town Moves! You'll laugh, you'll cry, and you'll be subjected to one of the greatest tangents about Gundam you've probably ever heard!

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My first memory of first-person shooters, as a genre, goes back to 1998. We'd gotten a shiny new PlayStation so my mom could play MediEvil, a game that I'm half-convinced she could still speedrun with her eyes closed. It didn't take my dad long to find stuff he wanted to play on the thing, either. Well, that's not entirely true. It took cursing his way through Resident Evil, Dino Crisis, and Tenchu because they "didn't control right" before he stumbled onto first-person shooters. And while he did pick up Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, and other games of the day, the one I first remember watching most was Quake II.

There was something about that game that still stands out in my mind today. Little five year-old me was in awe of what was happening on the screen. Horrific, Eldritch polygonal monstrosities ran at the screen, as if they were about to jump out into our living room. Sprawling labyrinths lay open on our flickering Sanyo CRT TV, like a window into another w…

At some point in my decade-plus manga-reading career, there's always been some kind of pulpy, gory garbage manga that I can't get enough of. As in, I buy every volume as it comes out, without fail, and never stop talking about it. The first one that stands out to me is Princess Resurrection, a criminally underrated little series about vampires, werewolves, and really pretty blond ladies cutting things apart with chainsaws. Unfortunately, the series petered out with time, and sooner than later, my trashy gore manga plate was empty.

That's when I found Dance in the Vampire Bund. I'll probably write something more in-depth about that series one day, honestly, but I'll keep it brief here. Stumbling onto that first volume of Nozomu Tamaki's boob-and-butt-laden, blood-and-guts-filled, stupid-lore-enriched saga was a life-changing experience for me, to be honest. From 2009 to the very last volume of Scarlet Order, I poured myself into it. Every spin-off that came out…

I've definitely given it some guff in the past year for the way it utilizes "bury your gays" and sort of kind of queerbaits players. However, I still feel like it's something special in this industry. It's authentic. It's heartfelt. It's something that Telltale and David Cage at the top of their game couldn't get close to touching in terms of sincerity and ambition. Cringeworthy dialogue notwithstanding, I feel confident in still claiming it as one of my favorites of the current decade.

Which is why it pains me that Life Is Strange: Before the Storm was allowed to happen. Because for everything the original did right, this limp prequel finds ten things to do wrong. Deck Nine, a developer known for Cool Boarders, Pain, and a port of Ratchet Deadlocked, have managed to suck the joy and stylistic ambition out of the franchise in every nanosecond. The write…

Last year, I was at ground zero of Sonic the Hedgehog - the Sonic 25th Anniversary party in San Diego. Yeah, the one with the awkward silences and broken livestream. It wasn't the disaster some made it out to be, and honestly, Crush 40 was pretty sick in concert. Still, there was a whole lot there I couldn't muster a single fuck about, and the communal chili dog station was kind of nasty, if we're being honest.

I digress. There were two major takeaways that night, for me. Firstly, the reveal of the game that would come to be known as Sonic Forces, during which an enthused fan punched me in the shoulder and almost prompted me to curbstomp him on the spot. Secondly, the debut of Sonic Mania, which happened while I was outside in a line that wrapped all the way around the building. Later on in the evening, I actually got my hands on it, and liked what I played. It felt like Sonic on the Genesis, straight-up. Sure, I questioned the necessity of making another game of that, but…

"What goes up, must come down," croons Johnny Gioeli in the opening cinematic of Sonic Heroes. Those words ring true for the game's star. Sonic's heyday was over. The Dreamcast was dead. Sega was struggling to put out relevant games as a third-party developer. Sonic and Sega, those tragic, star-crossed figures with fates too entangled for their own good, were in a bad place. At the very least, Sonic Adventure 2 Battle had done well enough as an early Gamecube exclusive to give them time to pump money into another Sonic game.

With the Adventure formula doing well enough for Sonic Team, they decided that 3D was the route they wanted to keep taking with the franchise. And on paper, all the pieces for a good game were there. A plot that involved teams of different Sonic characters racing against each other, coupled with diverging campaigns that offered potential twists on the gameplay, depending on who the player chose. It would be done on a new generation of consoles, …